The latest CIA torture suit brought by former detainees presents an interesting variation on the typical post-9/11 state secrets cases: this time it is the defendants rather than the plaintiffs who seek to introduce information that the government alleges may harm national security.

I was honored to be invited to give a keynote speech at an Intelligence Community legal conference last Wednesday, May 6. The speech was entitled Toward Greater Transparency of National Security Legal Work.

This is a very interesting case. The other day, federal district judge Edgardo Ramos in New York threw out a defamation lawsuit between two private parties on the government's intervening motion asserting the state secrets privilege. The case is Restis v. American Coalition Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI). The 18-page opinion is worth reading.

The transcript of Judge Edgardo Ramos' Wednesday hearing in Restis v. United Against Nuclear Iran ("UANI")is in---and full of fascinating questions about the government's use of the state secrets privilege.

Last week---and in a somewhat unusual development---the Department of Justice filed a motion to intervene, stay, and dismiss a private lawsuit against a non-profit organization, citing the state secrets privilege. In short, the United States believes that the litigation's further progress might risk the release of national security information.

Andrew Beaujon at Poynter reports that at last week’s Sources and Secrets conference, NYT reporter James Risen, who is fighting a subpoena for information in the Jeffrey Sterling trial, made these remarks:

1) The Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

Back in 1975, the Attorney General was Edward Levi. Levi was extraordinarily distinguished, and had been appointed to this position in no small part to bring order and restore trust in the aftermath of tumultuous events of the early 1970s. Related to that, he was at the helm as the Church and Pike Committees went about their work investigating various national security activities and related scandals, including investigations touching on NSA programs in

There's been a fair amount of buzz over the past few days centered around the idea of a statutory "drone court"--a tribunal modeled after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that would (presumably) provide at least som

Judge Colleen McMahon of the District Court of the Southern District of New York has granted summary judgment to the government in the consolidated FOIA cases brought by the New York Times and the ACLU. The plaintiffs were seeking information about the government's targeted killing program in the War on Terror. Judge McMahon summarizes the requests as follows: